


run, run, lost boy

by StarryCleric



Category: The Umbrella Academy (TV)
Genre: Angst, Dissociation, Gen, Good Brother Klaus Hargreeves, Hurt/Comfort, Number Five | The Boy Has Issues, Number Five | The Boy Needs A Hug, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, dear god someone help this grumpy old man
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-29
Updated: 2019-05-29
Packaged: 2020-03-29 13:00:13
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,748
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19020424
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/StarryCleric/pseuds/StarryCleric
Summary: He’s really done it this time. First he abandons his family, then he lets them get brutally killed, and now he’s going to keel over and die with lungs filled with coals, all alone.Sometimes, even the smallest things are enough to send Five spiraling to a dark place.





	run, run, lost boy

Time is slow, and distant, each second taking a lifetime to crawl by. He would say it feels like drifting underwater if not for the crackling heat that pulls the moisture from his skin, leaving him hollow and dry. The ash that covers the landscape falls and falls and never lands. His mind flits briefly to a different Never Land, from a half remembered story that stirs briefly before turning to smoke, where children who ran away never grew up.

All of this is wrong. A tremor runs down his spine. His next inhale brings in a cloud of ash that sticks to the back of his parched throat and refuses to leave. It hurts too much to breathe, so he settles for small gasps that cut through the slow, silent world like the stab of a knife.

He’s been here before. Maybe he never left. Or maybe this is all there’s ever been, a whole existence spent trudging across a scorched landscape, filled with the sun-bleached bones of a dead world. Maybe he conjured up hallucinations of what it must have been like to be surrounded by shelter, and safety, and other people.

The ash in his throat builds, and it’s all he can do to wheeze through it.

Harsh sunlight burns against his back, making the world warp and shake like a mirage. When he lifts his hands, they’re shaking as well. Clutched in the left one is something smooth and round, wrapped in a charred scrap of cloth that is seconds from falling apart. He pulls it away slowly. As soon as his fingers touch the fabric, it crumbles to dust, revealing the glass eye his fingers are clenched around. The serial is hazy, the numbers blurring together no matter how hard he tries to focus on them. He can’t remember where he found it, or why he kept it, why can’t he remember…?

He’s tired. So tired. The fires rage on.

He closes his eyes as the world twists nauseatingly, the movement sending him spiraling to his knees. The burning rubble digs into his unprotected skin, bruising him and sending shockwaves through his legs to join the rattling in his chest. 

_Five? Hey Five…_

He opens his bleary eyes to stare into clouded dead ones. His siblings’ bodies stand in a circle around him. If he couldn’t breathe through the ash before, it’s nothing compared to the tight band that must be compressing his lungs now. 

Luther towers over him, staring at him prone on the ground from what feels like miles above his own head. His mangled arms hang limp at his sides. To his left, Diego watches with a thick line of dry blood trailing out of the corner of his mouth. Allison stands to his right. The wind picks up strands of her blood-encrusted hair and whistles around the shards of shrapnel embedded in her torso. None of them make a sound or any movements, seemingly content to just stand there with haunted eyes, as a monument to his failure.

_Five, where are you, kid?_

He turns around. Klaus’s limbs are twisted and broken, and his mouth doesn’t move, even though he can hear a voice drifting in the air alongside the ash. 

Where is he? The end of the world, with his family come to remind him that his fucking pride ruined everything, and now this is all there will ever be.

He forces himself to stare at the ruined bodies that surround him with hollow eyes. All of the apologies in the world won’t fix this, and he doesn’t deserve to look away. One by one, they move in closer, reaching out in desperation, or maybe to drag him to wherever they came from. He can’t tell if the choked noises he’s hearing come from them or from himself, but he does know there are hands on him that burn where they touch.

_Come on buddy, come back to me. Tell me what you’re seeing._

The heat and fire dancing in the corners of his vision impossibly seem to intensify. The dead hands clutching him turn grey and crack, slowly releasing their grips as they break down and join the rest of the landscape, drifting away to become… 

“Ash,” he croaks. “Ash and smoke.”

He’s not sure who he’s talking to, when the whole world is empty. The grey flakes swirling around him are made up of what little remains of his siblings, now.

He can’t breathe.

_Woah, woah, take it easy, Five. I don’t love how wheezy you’re sounding…_

The band around his chest is tight, too tight. The ash that lines his throat and the smoke that fills his lungs choke out any hope he had of inhaling ever again. Black spots play in his vision, mingling with the flecks of sparks in the air.

He’s really done it this time. First he abandons his family, then he lets them get brutally killed, and now he’s going to keel over and die with lungs filled with coals, all alone.

_Oh Christ, you’re really hyperventilating. Okay, breathe with me, Five._

The grey-black-red of the world begins to blur. He falls forward, curled in a ball on the ground, trailing his hand through the ashes of his siblings. There’s a different sort of pressure on his chest now, like someone is pressing the palm of their hand into his breastbone. The adrenaline coursing through his veins makes it hard to concentrate on anything but the screaming in his head and in his chest, but if he focuses, he can feel the slow rise and fall of… something, nearby. He stutters through a breath at the pace he can feel, and then another. The sparks and ash around him become hazier. 

_That’s it, just inhale… and exhale._

He forces out another rush of air. It kicks up a cloud that settles over his skin. His eyelids flutter shut against the dust. In the dark, he can almost imagine that the air is cool and the ground is smooth instead of gritty and painful. It’s so unlike what he’s used to… 

_Five?_

He opens his eyes.

He’s laying on his back, staring up at a light fixture in a ceiling, absolutely covered in cold sweat that sticks to his back and trembling uncontrollably. His heart is racing and he’s panting like he just finished running a marathon. There’s a bony, tattooed hand on resting lightly on his chest.

He looks to his left to stare at Klaus, who is kneeling right beside him. Klaus is pressing Five’s own small, clammy hand over his heart while taking deliberately slow, steady breaths. Before he can even process what’s going on, Five yanks his hand as hard as he can away from Klaus and tries to twist away on the floor.

“Hey, woah, there he is!” Klaus says, easing up and letting Five thrash away.

“What…” Five tries to hiss, but his dry throat barely scratches the words out as a whisper. “Klaus, what are you…”

“Yikes, you sound like shit, little man. Here, want some water?” Klaus reaches for a water bottle behind him.

Almost instinctively, Five snatches it away from him. Choosing to ignore the comment about his size, he twists at the lid, but his hands are shaking too hard and his arms feel like they’re made of wet tissue paper. The cap won’t budge. A huff of frustration at his stupid body builds in his chest, but the noise that comes out sounds more desperate than he intended.

“Jesus Five, let me help you with that.”

“Back off,” Five snarls, clutching the bottle closer as Klaus leans forward. “I don’t – I don’t need your help. I’m fine.”

“Clearly.” Klaus settles back on the floor. “Let me ask you this, since you’re doing so ‘fine.’ Where are you right now?”

“I’m –” Five blinks, eyes darting around to figure out the answer to Klaus’s question. A ceiling, four walls, doors. The smell of smoke coming from somewhere to the left, from the door behind Klaus. 

A noise embarrassingly close to a whimper slips out from behind his clenched jaw.

Klaus’s eyes widen. “Oh shit, the fajitas!” He leaps to his feet before Five can do more than furrow his brow in confusion and dashes through the door to the kitchen.

The kitchen. Five is at the mansion.

Five tightens his grip on the water bottle and draws his knees up underneath his chin, trying to focus through the smell of smoke and the gut-wrenching twist in his stomach that follows. If he were less stubborn, he would vomit, but as it is he doesn't think he can afford to lose much more water than he’s apparently already sweat out onto the floor, so he just closes his eyes and tries to bring his heaving breaths back down to a normal level. The fractured numbers and equations that always flare behind his eyelids are more scattered than usual, so he starts to murmur the digits of pi out loud to bring them back into focus.

He’s not sure exactly how much time passes while he tries to center himself, but it’s long enough for the smoke to fade away. It’s not long enough to completely stop the violent trembling in his arms or the cold sweat that keeps breaking out across his whole body. 

Fingertips lightly brushed against his shoulder. He flinches and tightens his death grip around his knees. 

“Hey there, buddy, it’s just me again, it’s just your big brother Klaus, back to check on how you’re doing.” Klaus’s normally airy, lilting voice is lowered to a whisper, and the fingers still resting on his shoulder are surprisingly gentle. It would take no effort at all to twitch away from them. For some reason, he doesn’t.

When he cracks his eyes open, Klaus is hovering over him with a more serious expression than Five has ever seen from the man. 

He shrugs his shoulders underneath Klaus’s fingers. “Get away from me, I don’t need to be ‘checked on’,” Five says, scrubbing his suspiciously wet face. “In fact, if you must know, I-I’m very busy at the moment with important business that I need to get back to.” He has no idea if he has enough energy to blink away from this room, but Klaus doesn’t need to know that.

Klaus scoffs. “And what important business would that be?”

“The kind of business that you c-couldn’t wrap your pea brain around in a million years, dipshit,” Five snaps back, letting the spark of anger color his raised voice. “Unless you’ve become a pioneer in the field of temporal physics in the past couple of days?”

With an infuriatingly calm smirk, Klaus leans back but keeps resting his hand on Five’s shoulder. “And what part of pioneering temporal physics involves having a complete meltdown on the living room floor, exactly? Is it the temporal part or the physics part, you’ll have to remind me.”

“This isn’t a meltdown, this is… this is…” No good excuse conveniently springs to mind. Five’s jaw snaps closed.

“So temporal physics aside,” Klaus says, as though Five hadn’t stammered through any protest at all, “let me give _my_ interpretation of events, seeing as how your memory of the past few minutes seems a bit dim, hermanito.” 

Five inhales to interrupt, but Klaus just waves his “GOODBYE” hand in his face to stop him. “It seems to me, that you were walking down here, minding your own business, when you happened to come across my failed attempts at grilling chicken for dinner tonight. And wouldn’t you know it, but something about that just happened to trigger a teeny little flashback in your 58-year-old brain that made you shut down so hard I had to coach you back into breathing like a human and not a fish out of water.” He leans forward so Five is forced to make eye contact with him. “Does that sound about right to you?”

Five slaps away Klaus’s hand and blinks to the other side of the room. Tearing open a hole in the space-time continuum drains what little energy he’d managed to scrape together, and the instant he lands he knows he’s pushed himself too far. His fingers have gone numb and the walls around him are swirling wildly. Klaus turns around just in time to watch him collapse to the ground in a trembling heap.

“Christ on a cracker, Fivey. Not every conversation about your feelings has to have a dramatic exit,” Klaus says, sliding closer to pull Five into his lap. Five puts up a token protest, but the motion makes black spots swim in his vision and it’s all he can do to keep from passing out. 

“I’m not dramatic,” he mutters, too exhausted to put any real heat into the words. “I’m being realistic and not wasting time before the end of the world.”

“You keep saying that, champ, but since you won’t tell us anything about what’s going on, I just have to think that this whole ‘end of the world’ thing can’t _really_ be all that bad, can it? Since it’s only going to take one person to stop it, and all.”

There’s something a bit strange about Klaus’s tone, but Five is too shaken to put his finger on it in lieu of trying to process what the fuck his brother just said. “Not… not ‘all that bad’?” He stares up at Klaus, the mounting anger in his gut giving him the clarity of mind to bring the room back into focus.

“Well sure, since you’re _clearly_ not having any lasting issues, then how bad could it possibly be?”

Five forces his left arm around to grab Klaus by the collar of his shirt and drag him closer. “Forty years, Klaus. Decades in a burning world without a single goddamn thing left alive besides the cockroaches and me.” He’s shivering now, but he can’t stop himself from hissing into Klaus’s face. “I was _thirteen_ and starving to death all alone, trying to drag myself to the next fucking pile of rubble that used to be a building and praying to God that I’d find a water bottle or something so I’d live through the night.”

Klaus looks like he wants to say something, but now that Five’s started, he can’t stop. “Don’t you get it, Klaus? The apocalypse means there’s _nothing_ left, no people, no food, no shelter. J-just fire, and smoke, and ash… dragging yourself around over shards of glass and coals since you’re too dizzy to stand, and knowing if you stop you’ll just die since there’s no one left on the fucking planet that could help… God, Klaus, the smell of all those burning corpses…” He’s not sure when it started, but there’s a sob building in his throat that all his words are catching on. It’s getting harder to keep Klaus’s face in focus above him. 

“Was that it then?” Klaus says. “The smell, I mean.”

Five almost doesn’t hear him over the pounding of his own heartbeat that’s started up in his ears again. “What?”

“The smell of meat burning. That’s what triggered you the first time.”

Five blinks, and suddenly realizes exactly how Klaus had goaded him into talking about the apocalypse out loud. And how he fell for it, like a goddamn weepy idiot. He sucks in a breath, then another, and before he can stop himself there are tears quietly pouring down his cheeks.

“Oh no, oh no, Five…” Five is too horrified by the fact that he’s actually crying in front of his brother to stop Klaus from wrapping his arms all the way around him. He heaves Five up so he can pull him in to rest against his chest and tuck Five’s head right between his chin and his collarbone. 

Out of nowhere, Five realizes he hasn’t been hugged for decades.

The sob in his throat bursts out of him, and before he can even consider getting a hold of himself, he buries his face in Klaus’s chest and hugs him back with shaking arms.

He’s just so _fucking_ tired.

It’s not particularly loud, but Five is undeniably breaking down. Without moving his arms too much, Klaus begins stroking his head, gently tracing his fingers through his hair all the way down to his neck. Five’s stuttering breaths hitch, and he pulls himself even closer, listening to the sound of Klaus’s heartbeat. He doesn’t know if it’s the smoke, or the flashback, or just the unbelievably gentle treatment from the brother he hasn’t seen in so long, but he’s coming unraveled and he doesn’t know how to stop. 

Klaus starts humming something, probably some stupid song from the past seventeen years that Five hasn’t gotten around to listening to in between all his efforts to prevent the apocalypse. It doesn’t really matter what song it is. Between the vibration of his voice, and the comforting squeeze of his hug, Klaus is somehow lifting some of the massive pressure off of Five’s shoulders and giving him space to regroup.

The tears last longer than Five ever thought they would. When Klaus finally pulls a few inches away to get a better look at him, he knows he must be an honest to God disaster. Tears streaking down his face, sweat drying in his hair and smeared across his skin. It’ll be a miracle if he can ever look Klaus in the eye again.

Klaus sighs heavily. “Sorry about that, Five. Just… yeah. Jesus. You’ve really been keeping a lot of shit bottled up, huh?” 

Five sniffs, feeling practically more exhausted than he’s ever been in his entire life. “It’s…” he says, but Klaus interrupts him.

“I swear on our father’s grave, you little gremlin, if you say it’s fine one more time I’ll take away all your chalk for a month.”

Five wrinkles his brow, but settles for just sighing heavily and struggling to keep his eyes open. 

“Getting sleepy, huh? Yeah, me too, kid. And the fajitas were a bust, anyway. Diego told me to leave the cooking to Mom, I guess he was finally right about something.”

“‘M n-not a kid…”

“Yeah, sorry about that, grandpa.” Klaus pulls him all the way up into a sitting position, then runs a critical eye over Five’s thoroughly rumpled appearance. “You up for walking, or do I need to carry you?”

Five closes his eyes and shakes his head. It seems like words are a bit outside his realm of capability at the moment, but he certainly doesn’t need anyone to carry him to bed. Klaus doesn’t seem to get the message, because a second later he’s been scooped up onto Klaus’s back and is carried out of the living room. He groans as the movement makes his head spin, even with his eyes closed, and Klaus hesitates for just a second before heading up the stairs with a huff.

“Good god, Five, how can someone as skinny as you be this hard to move around?” Klaus says, pausing at the top of the stairs to catch his breath. 

“Could’ve let me walk on my own,” Five murmurs into the back of his neck. Klaus doesn’t seem to have anything to say to that before taking off… to the left. Away from Five’s room.

“Where are you…”

“If you think I’m letting you go back to your room to scribble on your walls with chalk while half dead from exhaustion, you’ve got another thing coming.” Klaus pushes open the door to his own room and sets Five down on his own bed. Five blinks at the total mess of a room while Klaus rummages around in his drawers, looking for God knows what. He lets his hands fall to the soft sheets he’s sitting on. The fabric is cool and smooth as he runs his fingers along the seams, and despite being distantly irked that he’s not in his own room, he can barely avoid falling over and just passing out on the bed immediately.

Klaus tosses a bundle at him that nearly hits him square in the face. “Got a present for you! Something better than those old stiff pajamas you’ve been using.”

Five looks down at the clothes in his lap. It’s a large black sweatshirt, some loose grey pants, and a pair of socks made of the softest material he’s ever touched. 

“I know you’re tired, but if you can change into those real fast you’re gonna be way more comfortable than if you try to sleep in that blazer you’ve got.” Klaus is looking him over and only stops chewing his lip worriedly when Five makes eye contact with him.

“...Thanks.” Five changes into the soft clothes as quickly as he can manage and oh, he didn’t even know that clothes could even be this soft and comfortable. Another rush of tears threatens to appear, but he blinks them away and focuses on crawling under the covers that Klaus is holding open for him. A small part of his mind is insisting that he should put up more of a fuss and demand to go back to his own room like a goddamn adult, but it’s so easy to ignore that voice when he’s this tired and cried out. After only the briefest moment of hesitation, he’s curled up in a ball underneath the blankets that Klaus tucks around him securely.

Klaus is sitting on the edge of the bed, watching him almost expectantly. “Ready to hit the hay, then?”

He’s fucking exhausted, and he’s shared more feelings today than he ever has, but while he’s in this weird frame of mind and so he never has to do a day like this again, he reaches out and grabs Klaus’s hand. “For what it’s worth, Klaus. The worst part of it all was m-missing my family. Being so far away from you and not knowing if I’d ever get back.”

Klaus stills, then squeezes his hand. “It’s worth a lot, Five. Yeah. It’s worth a lot.” He reaches over to push the hair out of Five’s face, and lets his hand rest on his forehead for a second. “Now close your eyes and go to sleep. I’ll be here when you wake up.”

Five nods, lets his eyes fall shut, and for once drifts off without being afraid that the fires at the end of the world will find him in his sleep.

**Author's Note:**

> @ the umbrella academy writers: please let someone give this traumatized elderly teenager a hug thank u


End file.
